In recent years, a lot of research has been done for a light emitting device which emits, as illumination light, fluorescence that a light emitting section including a fluorescent material generates in response to excitation light emitted onto the light emitting section by an excitation light source such as a semiconductor light emitting element, e.g., a light emitting diode (LED) or a semiconductor laser (LD: Laser Diode).
Examples of such a light emitting device encompass a vehicle headlamp disclosed in Patent Literature 1. The vehicle headlamp includes an LED module or an LD module as an excitation light source, and generates white light by emitting excitation light onto a fluorescent material formed into small dots each having a diameter of approximately 0.5 mm or less. The white light thus generated is reflected forward by a reflector having an elliptic spherical surface or a paraboloidal surface, so that the white light is incident on a projector lens.